Amenities of Literature Part 19

The history of printing ill.u.s.trates this view of its origin. The invention has been long ascribed to GUTENBERG, yet some have made it doubtful whether this presumed father of the art ever succeeded in printing a book, for we are a.s.sured that no colophon has revealed his name. We hear of his attempts and of his disappointments, his bickerings and his lawsuits. He seems to have been a speculative bungler in a new-found art, which he mysteriously hinted was to make a man's fortune.

The goldsmith, Fust, advanced a capital in search of the novel alchymy--the project ends in a lawsuit, the goldsmith gains his cause, and the projector is discharged. Gutenberg lures another simple soul, and the same golden dream vanishes in the dreaming. These copartners, evidently tired of an art which had not yet found an artist, a young man, probably improving on Gutenberg's blunders, one happy day displayed to the eyes of his master, Fust, a proof pulled from his own press. In rapture, the master confers on this Peter Schoeffer a share of his future fortunes; and to bind the apprentice by the safest ties of consanguinity, led the swart youth, glorious with printer's ink, to the fair hand of his young daughter. The new partnership produced their famed Psalter of 1457; and shortly followed their magnificent Bible.

While these events were occurring, COSTAR, of Haarlem, was plodding on with the same "n.o.ble mystery," but only printing on one side of a leaf, not having yet discovered that a leaf might be contrived to contain two pages. The partisans of Costar a.s.sert that it was proved he subst.i.tuted moveable for fixed letters, which was a giant's footstep in this new path. A faithless servant ran off with the secret. The history of printing abounds with such tales. Every step in the progress of the newly-invented art indicates its gradual accessions. The numbering of the pages was not thought of for a considerable time; the leaves were long only distinguished by letters or signatures--a custom still preserved, though apparently superfluous.

There is something attractive for rational curiosity in the earliest beginnings of every art; every slight improvement, even though trivial, has its motive, and supplies some want. On this principle the history of punctuation enters into the history of literature. Caxton had the merit of introducing the Roman pointing as used in Italy; and his successor, Pynson, triumphed by domiciliating the Roman letter. The dash, or perpendicular line, thus, was the only punctuation they used. It was, however, discovered that "the craft of poynting well used makes the sentence very light." The more elegant comma supplanted the long uncouth ; the colon was a refinement, "showing that there is more to come." But the semicolon was a Latin delicacy which the obtuse English typographer resisted. So late as 1580 and 1590 treatises on orthography do not recognise any such innovator; the Bible of 1592, though printed with appropriate accuracy, is without a semicolon; but in 1633 its full rights are established by Charles Butler's "English Grammar." In this chronology of the four points of punctuation it is evident that Shakspeare could never have used the semicolon--a circ.u.mstance which the profound George Chalmers mourns over, opining that semicolons would often have saved the poet from his commentators.

FUST had bound his workmen to secrecy by the solemnity of an oath; but at the siege of Mentz that freemasonry was lost. These early printers dispersed, some were even bribed away. Two Germans set up their press in the monastery of Subiaco, in the vicinity of Naples, whose confraternity consisted of German monks. These very printers finally retreated to Rome for that patronage they had still to seek; and at Rome they improved the art by adopting the Roman character. Not only the invention of the art was progressive, but the art itself was much more so.

We have other narratives of printers romantically spirited away from the parent-presses; one of the most extraordinary is the history of printing set up at Oxford, ten years before the art was practised in Europe, except at Haarlem and Mentz. Henry VI., by advice of the Archbishop of Canterbury, despatched a confidential agent in disguise, under the guidance of Caxton, in his trading journeys to Flanders. The Haarlemites were so jealous of idling strangers who had come on the same insidious design, that foreigners had frequently been imprisoned.

The royal agent never ventured to enter the city, but by heavy bribes in a secret intercourse with the workmen, one dark night he smuggled a printer aboard a vessel, and carried away Frederick Corsellis. That printer, on landing in England, was attended by a guard to Oxford. There he was constantly watched till he had revealed the mysterious craft. The evidence of this unheard-of history hinged on a record at Lambeth-palace authenticating the whole narrative, and on a monument of Corsellis's art, which any one might inspect at the Bodleian, being a book bearing a date six years prior to any printing by Caxton. The record at Lambeth, however, was never found, and never heard of, and the date of the book might have been accidentally or designedly falsified. An x dropped in the date of the impression would account for the singularity of a book printed before our Caxton had acquired the art. The tale long excited a sharp controversy, when Corsellis at Oxford was considered as the first printer in England. The possibility of the existence of this person at Oxford, and even of the book he printed, appears by a lively investigation of Dr. Cotton;[7] and I have been a.s.sured of a circ.u.mstance which, if true, would render the story of Corsellis probable; it is that a family of this name may still be found in Oxfordshire. The whole history has, however, by some been considered as supposit.i.tious, standing on the single evidence of a Sir Richard Atkyns, a servile lawyer and royalist of no great character in the days of Charles the Second.[8] Grafting his tale on the accident of the date of this book, he had a covert design--to maintain a theory or a right that printing was "a flower of the crown," const.i.tuting the sovereign the printer of England! all others being his servants. This enormous prevention of the abuses of the press was not deemed too extravagant for those desperate times.

The only certainty in the history of printing, after all the fables of its origin, is its native place. It is a German romance enlivened by some mysterious adventures, wanting only the opening pages, which no one can supply.[9] Even the most philosophic of bibliographers, Daunou, utters a cry of despair, and moreover, at this late day, seems at a loss to decide on the nature of the influence of the art of printing!

"We live too near the epoch of the discovery of printing to judge accurately of its influence, and too far from it to know the circ.u.mstances which gave birth to it." Our sage seems to think that another cycle of at least a thousand years must pa.s.s away ere we can decide on the real influence of printing over the destinies of man: this new tree of knowledge bears other fruit than that of its own sweetness, source of good and evil, of sense and of nonsense! whence we pluck the windy fruitage of opinions, crude and changeable!

How has it happened that such a plain story as that of the art of printing should have sunk into a romance? Solely because the monopolisers dreaded discovery. It originated in deception, and could only flourish for their commercial spirit in mysterious obscurity. Among the first artisans of printing every one sought to hide his work, and even to blind the workmen. After their operations, they cautiously unscrewed the four sides of their forms, and threw the scattered type beneath, for, as one craftily observed to his partner, "When the component parts of the press are in pieces, no one will understand what they mean." One of the early printers of the fifteenth century at Mutina, or Modena, professes his press to have been _in aedibus subterraneis_--doubtless, if possible, still further to darken the occult mystery. They delivered themselves in a mystical style when they alluded to their unnamed art, and impressed on the marvelling reader that the volume he held in his hand was the work of some supernatural agency. They announced that the volumes in this newly-found art were "neither drawn, nor written with a pen and ink, as all books before had been." In the "Recuyel of the Historyes of Troye," our honest printer, plain Caxton, caught the hyperbolical style of the dark monopolising spirit of the confraternity. I give his words, having first spelt them.

"I have practised and learned at my great charge, and dispense to ordain (put in order) this said book in print after the manner and form as ye may here see, and is not written with pen and ink as other books be, to the end that _every man may have them_ AT ONCE; for all the books of this story, thus imprinted as ye see, were _begun in one day, and also finished in one day_." A volume of more than seven hundred folio pages, "begun and finished in one day," was not the less marvellous for being impossible. But for the times was the style! Caxton would keep up the wonder and the mystery of an art which men did not yet comprehend; and because a whole sheet might have been printed in one day, and was _all at once_ pulled off, and not line by line, our venerable printer mystified the world. And all this was said at a time when so slow was the process of transcription, that one hundred Bibles could not be procured under the expense of seven thousand days, or of nearly twenty years' labour. Honest men, too eager in their zeal, particularly when their personal interests are at stake, sometimes strain truth on the tenter-hooks of fiction. The false miracle which our primeval printer professed he had performed we seem to have realized: it is amusing to conceive the wonderment of Caxton, were he now among us, to view the steam working that cylindrical machine which disperses the words of a speaker throughout the whole nation, when the voice which uttered them is still lingering on our ear!

FOOTNOTES:

[1] The city of Haarlem designs to erect a statue of COSTAR [since this was written the statue has been placed in the great square]; thus publicly, in the eyes of Europe, to vindicate the priority of this inventor of typography. But a statue is not the final argument which, like the cannon of monarchs (that _ultima ratio regum_), will carry conviction on the spot it is placed. Mentz has already erected a statue of GUTENBERG. I have no doubt that, in the present state of agitation, both these statues will have much to say to one another, as the mystical Pasquin and Marforio of typography.

[2] "Some Observations on the Use and Original of the n.o.ble Art and Mystery of Printing," by F. Burges. Norwich, 1701. This is declared to be the first book printed at Norwich; where it appears that the establishment of a printing-office, so late as in 1701, encountered a stern opposition from its sage citizens. The writer did not know that as far back as 1570 a Dutch printer had exercised the novel art by printing religious books for a community of Dutch emigrants who had taken refuge at Norwich, according to the recent discovery of Dr.

Cotton, in his "Typographical Gazetteer"--a volume abounding with the most vigorous researches.

[3] Hallam's "Introduction to the Literature of Europe," i. 211.

[4] Twenty copies of this famous Bible exist; one is preserved in our Royal Library.

[5] Ottley's "Inquiry into the Early History of Engraving." See also note in "Curiosities of Literature," vol. i, p. 43.

[6] Dr. WETTER, of Mentz, has lately shown that, contrary to the common opinion, Gutenberg himself printed long with _wooden blocks_; and that, instead of the invention of moveable types having been the result of long study, _it arose out of a "sudden fancy."_

How the Doctor has authenticated "the sudden fancy," I know not, but the apotheosis has pa.s.sed. In three successive days, in the month of August, 1837, all Mentz congregated to worship the statue, by Thorwaldsen, of their ancient citizen in the square that henceforward bears his name. A chorus of 700 voices resounded the laud of the German printer; the flags in the regatta waved to his honour; and the festival rejoiced the city: and when the figure of Gutenberg was unveiled, the artillery, the music, and the people's voices, blending together, seemed to echo in the skies.

[7] Dr. Cotton's curious "Typographical Gazetteer," art. OXONIA. Of a cla.s.s of the earliest printed books, having no printer's name, he observes, "These may have been printed by Corsellis, or any one else."

[8] Atkyns on the "Original and Growth of Printing." This quarto pamphlet is highly valued among collectors for Loggan's beautiful print of Charles the Second, Archbishop Shelden, and General Monk.

Dr. Middleton refuted this ridiculous tale of an ideal printer, one Corsellis, in his "Dissertation on the Origin of Printing in England," first published 1735, and which now may be seen in his works.

[9] The fourth day of the "Bibliographical Decameron" of Dr. Dibdin exhibits an ample view of the pending controversies on the "Origines Typographicae." Every bibliographer has his favourite hero. The reader will observe that I have none! And yet possibly my tale may be the truest.

THE FIRST ENGLISH PRINTER.

The ambitious wars of a potent aristocracy inflicted on this country half a century of public misery. Our fields were a soil of blood; and maternal England long mourned for victories she obtained over her own children--lord against lord, brother against brother, and the son against the father. Rival administrations alternately dispossess each other by sanguinary conflict; a new monarch attaints the friends of his predecessor; conspiracy rises against conspiracy--scaffold against scaffold; the king is re-enthroned--the king perishes in the Tower; York is triumphant--and York is annihilated.

Few great families there were who had not immolated their martyrs or their victims; and it frequently occurred that the same family had fallen equally on both sides, for it was a war of the aristocracy with the aristocracy: "Save the commons and kill the captains," was the general war-cry. The distracted people were perhaps indifferent to the varying fortunes of the parties, accustomed as they were to behold after each battle the heads of lords and knights raised on every bridge and gate.

During this dread interval, all things about us were thrown back into a state of the rudest infancy; the illiterature of the age approached to barbarism; the evidences of history were destroyed; there was such a paucity of readers, that no writers were found to commemorate contemporary events. Indeed, had there been any, who could have ventured to arbitrate between such contradictory accounts, where every party had to tell their own tale? Oblivion, not history, seemed to be the consolation of those miserable times.

It was at such an unhappy era that the new-found art of printing was introduced into England by an English trader, who for thirty years had pa.s.sed his life in Flanders, conversant with no other languages than were used in those countries.

Our literature was interested in the intellectual character of our first English printer. A powerful mind might, by the novel and mighty instrument of thought, have created a national taste, or have sown that seed of curiosity without which no knowledge can be reared. Such a genius might have antic.i.p.ated by a whole century that general pa.s.sion for sound literature which was afterwards to distinguish our country.

But neither the times nor the man were equal to such a glorious advancement.

The first printed book in the English language was not printed in England. It is a translation of Raoul le Fevre's "Recuyel of the Historyes of Troye," famed in its own day as the most romantic history, and in ours, for the honour of bibliography, romantically valued at the cost of a thousand guineas. This first monument of English printing issued from the infant press at Cologne in 1471, where Caxton first became initiated in "the n.o.ble mystery and craft" of printing, when printing was yet truly "a mystery," and Caxton himself did not import the art which was to effect such an intellectual revolution till a year or two afterwards, on his return home. The first printer, it is evident, had no other conception of the machine he was about to give the nation than as an ingenious contrivance, or a cheap subst.i.tute for costly ma.n.u.scripts--possibly he might, in his calculating prudence, even be doubtful of its success!

At the announcement of the first printed book in our vernacular idiom, the mind involuntarily pauses: looking on the humble origin of our bibliography, and on the obscure commencement of the newly-found art of printing itself, we are startled at the vast and complicated results.

The contemporaries of our first printer were not struck by their novel and precious possession, of which they partic.i.p.ated in the first fruits in the circulation and multiplication of their volumes. The introduction of the art into England is wholly unnoticed by the chroniclers of the age, so unconscious they were of this new implement of the human mind.

We find Fabian, who must have known Caxton personally--both being members of the Mercers' Company--pa.s.sing unnoticed his friend; and instead of any account of the printing-press, we have only such things as "a new weatherc.o.c.k placed on the cross of St. Paul's steeple." Hall, so copious in curious matters, discovered no curiosity to memorialize in the printing-press; Grafton was too heedless; and Holinshed, the most complete of our chroniclers, seems to have had an intention of saying something by his insertion of a single line, noticing the name of "Caxton as the first practiser of the art of printing;" but he was more seriously intent in the same paragraph to give a narrative of "a b.l.o.o.d.y rain, the red drops falling on the sheets which had been hanged to dry."

The history of printing in England has been vainly sought for among English historians; so little sensible were they to those expansive views and elevated conceptions, which are now too commonplace eulogies to repeat.

By what subdolous practices among the first inventors of this secret art Caxton obtained its mastery, we are not told, except that he learnt the new art "at his own great cost and expense;" and on his final return home, he was accompanied by foreigners who lived in his house, and after his death became his successors. Wynkyn de Worde, Pynson, Machlinia and others, by their names betray their German origin. We have recently discovered that we had even a French printer who printed English books.

Francis Regnault (or Reynold, anglicised) was a Frenchman who fell under the displeasure of the Inquisition for printing the Bible in English. He resided in England, and had in hand a number of primers in English and other similar books, which at length excited the jealousy of _the Company of Booksellers in London_--in the reign of Henry the Eighth. To allay this bibliopolic storm, the affrighted French printer, with all his stock in hand, procured Coverdale and Grafton to intercede with Cromwell to grant him a licence to sell what he had already printed, engaging hereafter "to print no more in the _English tongue_ unless he have an _Englishman_ that is learned to be his corrector;" and further, he offers to cancel and reprint any faulty leaf again.[1]

Caxton did not extend his views beyond those of a mercantile printer and an indifferent translator. As a writer, Caxton had reason to speak with humility of the style of his vernacular versions. His patroness, the Lady Margaret, sister to our Edward the Fourth, and d.u.c.h.ess of Burgundy, after inspecting some quires of his translation of the "Recuyel of the Historyes of Troye," returned them, finding, as Caxton ingenuously acknowledges, "some defaut in his English which she commanded him to amend." Tyrwhit sarcastically observes, that the d.u.c.h.ess might have been a purist. As we are not told what were these "defauts," we cannot decide on the good taste or the fastidiousness of the sister of Edward the Fourth. But the d.u.c.h.ess was not the only critic whom Caxton had to encounter, for we learn by his preface to his "Boke of aeneydos compiled by Virgil," now metamorphosed into a barbarous French prose romance, and the French translation translated, that there were "gentlemen who of late have blamed me that in my translations I had over-curious terms which could not be understood by common people. I fain would satisfy every man." He apologises for his own style by alleging the unsettled state of the English language, of which he tells us that "the language now used varieth far from that which was used and spoken when I was born." An absence of thirty years from his native land did not improve a diction which originally had been none of the purest.

We find in his translations an abundance of pure French words, and it is remarkable that the printer of the third edition of the Troy history, in 1607, altered whole sentences "into plainer English," alleging, "the translator, William Caxton, being, _as it seemeth_, no Englishman!"

The "curious" prices now given among the connoisseurs of our earliest typography for their "Caxtons," as his Gothic works are thus honourably distinguished, have induced some, conforming to traditional prejudice, to appreciate by the same fanciful value "the Caxtonian style." But though we are not acquainted with the "defauts" which offended the Lady Margaret, nor with the "terms which were not easily understood," as alleged by "the gentlemen," nor with "the sentences improperly Englished," as the later printer declared, we shall not, I suspect, fall short of the mark if we conclude that the style of a writer dest.i.tute of a literary education, a prolix genius with a lax verbosity, and almost a foreigner in his native idiom, could not attain to any skill or felicity in the maternal tongue.

As a printer, without erudition, Caxton would naturally accommodate himself to the tastes of his age, and it was therefore a consequence that no great author appears among "the Caxtons." The most glorious issues of his press were a Chaucer and a Gower, wherein he was simply a printer. The rest of his works are translations of fabulous histories, and those spurious writings of the monkish ages ascribed by ignorant transcribers to some ancient sage. He appears frequently to have been at a loss what book to print, and to have accidentally chosen the work in hand; so he tells us--"Having no work in hand, I sitting in my study, where as lay many diverse paunflettes and bookys, happened that to my hand came a lytel boke in French, which late was translated out of Latin by some n.o.ble clerk of France, which book is named aeneydos." And this was the origin of his puerile romance! He exercised no discrimination in his selection of authors, and the simplicity of our first printer far exceeded his learning. One of his greater works is "The n.o.ble History of King Arthur and of certain of his Knights." Caxton, who had charmed himself and his ignorant readers with his authentic "aeneydos," hesitated to print "this history," for there were different opinions that "there was no such Arthur, and that all such books as be made of him be but feigned and fables." It would be difficult to account for the scepticism of one who always found the marvellous more delectable than the natural, and who had published so many "feigned" histories--as "The veray trew History of the valiant Knight Jason," or the "Life of Hercules," and all "The Merveilles of Virgil's Necromancy," solemnly vouching for their verity! His sudden scruples were, however, relieved, when "a gentleman"

a.s.sured our printer that "it was great folly and blindness in the disbelievers of this true history."

In the early stage of civilization men want knowledge to feel any curiosity; like children, they are only affected through the medium of their imagination. But it is a phenomenon in the history of the human mind, that at a period of refinement we may approximate to one of barbarism. This happens when the ruling pa.s.sion wholly returns to fiction, and thus terminates in a reckless disregard for all other studies. Whenever history, severe and lofty, displaying men as they are, is degraded among the revels and the masques of romance; and the slow inductions of reasoning, and the minute discoveries of research, and the nice affinities of a.n.a.logy, are impatiently rejected, while fiction in her exaggerated style swells every object into a colossal size, and raises every pa.s.sion into hyperbolical violence; a distaste for knowledge, and a coldness for truth, which must follow, are fatal to the sanity of the intellect. And thus in the day of our refinement we may be reverting to our barbarous infancy.

Caxton, mindful of his commercial interests and the taste of his readers, left the glory of restoring the cla.s.sical writers of antiquity, which he could not read, to the learned printers of Italy.[2] The Orator of Cicero, the histories of Herodotus and Polybius, the ethics of Seneca, and the elaborate volumes of St. Austin, were some of the rich fruits of the early typography of the German printers who had conveyed their new art to the Neapolitan monastery of Subiaco. Our English printer, indeed, might have heard of their ill-fortune, when, in a pet.i.tion to the Pope, they sent forth this cry--"Our house is full of proof-sheets, but we have nothing to eat!" The trivial productions from Caxton's press, romantic or religious legends, and treatises on hunting and hawking, and the moralities of the game of chess, with Reynard the Fox, were more amusing to the ignorant readers of his country; but the national genius was little advanced by a succession of "merveillous workes;" nor would the crude, unformed tastes of the readers be matured by stimulating their inordinate appet.i.tes. The first printing-press in England did not serve to raise the national taste out of its barbarous infancy. Caxton was not a genius to soar beyond his age, but he had the industry to keep pace with it, and with little judgment and less learning he found no impediment in his selection of authors or his progress in translation.

Our earliest printed works consist of these translations of French translations; and the historian of our poetry considered that this very circ.u.mstance, which originated in the general illiteracy of the times, was more favourable to our vernacular literature than would have been the publication of Roman writers in their original language. Had it not been for these French versions, Caxton could not have furnished any of his own. The multiplication of English copies multiplied English readers, and when at length there was a generation of readers, an English press induced many to turn authors who were only qualified to write in their native tongue.

Venerable shade of Caxton! the award of the tribunal of posterity is a severe decision, but an imprescriptible law! Men who appear at certain eras of society, however they be lauded for what they have done, are still liable to be censured for not doing what they ought to have done.

Patriarch of the printing-press! who to thy last and dying day withdrew not thy hand from thy work, it is hard that thou shouldst be amenable to a law which thy faculties were not adequate to comprehend; surely thou mayst triumph, thou simple man! amid the echoes of thy "Caxtonians"

rejoicing over thy Gothic leaves--but the historian of the human mind is not the historian of typography.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] "State Papers of Henry the Eighth," vol. i. 589.

[2] We have Caxton's own confession in his preface to "The Book of aeneydos," or the aeneid of Virgil, where, in soliciting the late-created poet-laureat in the University of Oxford, John Skelton, to oversee his prose translation of the French translation, he notices the translations of Skelton of "The Epistles of Tully," and the "History of Diodorus Siculus," _out of Latin into English_, and as "one that had read Virgil, Ovid, Tully, and all the other n.o.ble poets and orators to _me unknown_."